Mr. Voorhees
My sophomore year our band director was Mr. Voorhees, a cheerful round man with a surprising amount of muscle and curly hair that was also round, a round face surrounded by perfectly round curls about the diameter of a dime. He came in like a whirlwind and I loved him. He had an engaging manner and loved to laugh. He knew lots of interesting facts, yet did not take any guff from the boys inclined to goof off. He started a Tae Kwon Do class in the school’s old 1930s wooden gymnasium, the same place we assembled for pep rallies and SAT tests. It smelled of old wood; the top of the room was an oval used for running laps when for whatever reason we had gym there instead of in the new gymnasium across the campus. We were too inexperienced to call his class a dojo; Karate Kid had come out and been a huge hit, but other than that none of us knew anything about martial arts.
I took Tae Kwon Do from him and did pretty well, considering I wasn’t athletically minded. I had crashed and burned the previous year in women’s basketball. I was on the swim team, not a fast swimmer. My parents bought the white beginner belt and let me test for the first rank, but when it came time to test for the next rank, they wouldn’t or couldn’t pay the fee. When Mr. Voorhees put his foot down and wouldn’t let me continue without testing for the next rank, my parents told me no. I reluctantly quit.
In band, though, I did well. I don’t remember if he was the founder of the jazz band; I think he may have been. He encouraged us to try out other instruments; I learned to get sound out of the oboe and learned to enjoy playing the bassoon. The school had a string bass, which I looked at with interest, but it was enormous and related to the violin [shudder]. I managed to get sound out of a clarinet but really struggled with the flute. I hated that flute was so hard to wrap my head around; I couldn’t consistently make a noise from it. But then, flutes were fairly common, and I did play bassoon, that oddball that no one else could or wanted to play.
